Many real world situations do not offer unambiguous outcome feedback on how to categorize objects. Models in the categorization literature have mostly been formulated for tasks with trial-by-trial outcome feedback. We examined if there was evidence for exemplar memory also when no external feedback is provided and the criterion is derivative of more abstract knowledge. In a “teacher-student” ta...

Work on animal symbolism, in particular that of Mary Douglas, suggests that the symbolic value of some animals is grounded in taxonomic anomaly. Yet the work of ethno-zoologists tends to show that folk-taxonomies are consistent and devoid of true anomalies. This raises a first problem. Moreover, not only anomalous animals, but also exemplary animals often take on a symbolic value, thus raising ...

Most cognitive psychology experiments evaluate models of human cognition using a relatively small, well-controlled set of stimuli. This approach stands in contrast to current work in neuroscience, perception, and computer vision, which have begun to focus on using large databases of natural images. We argue that natural images provide a powerful tool for characterizing the statistical environme...

Three studies tested the effects of essentialist beliefs regarding the national ingroup in situations where a perpetrator group has inflicted harm on a victim group. For members of the perpetrator group, it was hypothesised that ‘essentialism’ has a direct positive association with ‘collective guilt’ felt as a result of misdeeds conducted by other ingroup members in the past. Simultaneously, it...

Mental localization efforts tend to stress the where more than the what. We argue that the proper targets for localization are well-specified cognitive models. We make this case by relating an existing cognitive model of category learning to a learning circuit involving the hippocampus, perirhinal, and prefrontal cortex. Results from groups varying in function along this circuit (e.g., infants,...

This special issue is dedicated to the life, work, and legacy of Edward E. Smith, PhD. Ed’s career as a psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist was remarkable in virtually every respect: He had a tremendous impact on multiple areas of study, he received an impressive array of awards and honors, he mentored a number of students who have gone on to impressive careers of their own, and he was wi...

The finding that conjunctive concepts are easier for human subjects to learn than disjunctive concepts is reported in most introductory books on cognitive psychology. In this paper, we report some conditions under which this finding may not be true. In particular, we demonstrate that the prior causal knowledge of subjects can influence the rate of concept learning. We report on an experiment th...

This investigation explored effects of linguistic context on category structure in young and typical older adults. In a timed computer-based contextual categorization task, participants were provided with 150 stimulus sentences containing a superordinate category label. Participants were required to make a semantic decision relative to determining if a specific exemplar was the best example of ...

For most of the 20 century the fields of anthropology, psychology and economics have become increasingly insular, despite the substantial overlaps in their domains of inquiry. Recently however, with a growing recognition across these disciplines that human psychology, culture and behavior cannot be understood independently from one another, researchers have begun to integrate across these field...

Very young children have remarkably sophisticated causal knowledge about the world, yet relatively little is known about the process of causal learning. In this paper we provide a Bayesian model of how the interaction of prior theories and evidence can lead to ambiguity in competing causal hypotheses; we suggest that children seek to resolve such ambiguities through active exploration. In Exper...